Depleted Uranium - An American War Crime That Has No End

EuroYank

June 14, 2006

The Most Ignored & Covered Upby Mass Media News Story ...

Hundreds of Thousands of American TroopsContaminated, dying, and disabled from DepletedUranium by American Arms.

The
use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States, defying all
international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on earth
including the human species, and yet this country continues to do so
with full knowledge of its destructive potential.

Since
1991, the United States has staged four wars using depleted uranium
weaponry, illegal under all international treaties, conventions and
agreements, as well as under US military law.

The
vast majority of servicemen and women in the U.S. military, and likely
in the armed forces of other countries which are developing or have
obtained depleted uranium munitions, are unaware of the use and dangers
of depleted uranium munitions, or of the protective clothing and
procedures which can minimize or prevent serious short-term exposures.

The
continued use of this illegal radioactive weaponry, which has already
contaminated vast regions with low level radiation and will contaminate
other parts of the world over time, is indeed a world affair and an
international issue.

Read On ...From Gulf War I, fully 75% of our fighting men who were on the ground are now dead, dying, or sick from Depleted Uranium.

There
are reports that the Pentagon is preventing American soldiers from
writing home to complain about the variety of illness afflicting them
because of the deadly combination of Depleted Uranium and Toxic
Vaccinations.

The
Pentagon is said to be threatening to muster out soldiers who complain,
thus cutting off their medical care after they get out. However, when
these men do return home and they are very ill from D.U. contamination,
the Pentagon is refusing to*admit that these men are sick with D.U.!A special report published by eminent scientist*Leuren Moret naming depleted uranium as the definitive cause of the Gulf War Syndromehas fed a*growing scandalabout the continued use of uranium munitions by the US Military.

The Veterans Administration acknowledged a third of all living Gulf War veterans, 181,996 were collecting *service-related disability pensions.Now the same thing is happening to veterans of "Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq and occupying troops have been*contaminatedwith
astounding levels of radioactive depleted and non-depleted uranium as a
result of post-9/11 United States’ use of tons of uranium munitions.
Researchers say surrounding countries are bound to feel the effects as
well.

The Pentagon used its radioactive arsenal mainly in the*urban centers, rather
than in desert battlefields as in 1991. Many hundreds of thousands of
Iraqi people and U.S. soldiers, along with British, Polish, Japanese
and Dutch soldiers sent to join the occupation, will suffer the
consequences. The real extent of injuries, chronic illness, long-term
disabilities and genetic birth defects won't be apparent for five to 10
years.

Cancer,
respiratory diseases and horrible birth defects have been widespread in
Iraq even after Gulf War I and are bound to increase. While officially,
only 467 soldiers were wounded during the first Gulf War, according to
Terry Jemison at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), of the
more than 592,560 discharged personnel who served there, at least
179,310 - one third - are receiving disability compensation and over
24,760 additional cases were pending as of September 2004.

This
number of disabled veterans is shockingly high. Most are in their
mid-thirties and should be in the prime of health. Before sending
troops to the Gulf region, the military had already sifted out those
with disabilities or chronic health problems from asthma, diabetes,
heart conditions, cancers and birth defects.

In 2003 scientists from the*Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) studied
urine samples of Afghan civilians and found that 100% of the samples
taken had levels of non-depleted uranium (NDU) 400% to 2000% higher
than normal levels. The UMRC research team studied six sites, two in
Kabul and others in the Jalalabad area. The civilians were tested four
months after the attacks in Afghanistan by the United States and its
allies.

*NDU
is more radioactive than depleted uranium (DU), which itself is charged
with causing many cancers and severe birth defects in the Iraqi
population, especially children over the past ten years. Four million
pounds of radioactive uranium was dropped on Iraq in 2003 alone.
Uranium dust will be in the bodies of our returning armed forces.

Conducted
at the request of The News, as the U.S. government considers the cost
of $1,000 per affected soldier prohibitive, the test found that four of
the nine men were contaminated with high levels of DU, likely caused by
inhaling dust from depleted uranium shells fired by U.S. troops.

Most
American weapons (missiles, smart bombs, dumb bombs, bullets, tank
shells, cruise missiles, etc.) contain high amounts of radioactive
uranium. Depleted or non-depleted, these types of weapons, on
detonation, release a radioactive dust which, when inhaled, goes into
the body and stays there. It has a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Basically,
it’s a permanently available contaminant, distributed in the
environment, where dust storms or any water nearby can disperse it.
Once ingested, it releases subatomic particles that slice through DNA.

UMRC’s
Field Team found several hundred Afghan civilians with acute symptoms
of radiation poisoning along with chronic symptoms of internal uranium
contamination, including congenital problems in newborns. Local
civilians reported large, dense dust clouds and smoke plumes rising
from the point of impact, an acrid smell, followed by burning of the
nasal passages, throat and upper respiratory tract.

Subjects
in all locations presented identical symptom profiles and chronologies.
The victims reported symptoms including pain in the cervical column,
upper shoulders and basal area of the skull, lower back/kidney pain,
joint and muscle weakness, sleeping difficulties, headaches, memory
problems and disorientation.

At
the Uranium Weapons Conference held October 2003 in Hamburg, Germany,
independent scientists from around the world testified to a huge
increase in birth deformities and cancers wherever NDU and DU had been
used. Professor Katsuma Yagasaki, a scientist at the Ryukyus
University, Okinawa calculated that the 800 tons of DU used in
Afghanistan is the radioactive equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The
amount of DU used in Iraq is equivalent to 250,000 Nagasaki bombs.

At
the Uranium Weapons Conference, a demonstration by British-trained
oncologist Dr. Jawad Al-Ali showed photographs of the kinds of birth
deformities and tumors he had observed at the Saddam Teaching Hospital
in Basra just before the 2003 war. Cancer rates had increased
dramatically over the previous fifteen years.

In
1989 there were 11 abnormalities per 100,000 births; in 2001 there were
116 per 100,000—an increase of over a thousand percent. In 1989 34
people died of cancer; in 2001 there were 603 cancer deaths. The 2003
war has increased these figures exponentially.

At
a meeting of the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan held
December 2003 in Tokyo, the U.S. was indicted for multiple war crimes
in Afghanistan, among them the use of DU.

Leuren
Moret, President of Scientists for Indigenous People and Environmental
Commissioner for the City of Berkeley, testified that because
radioactive contaminants from uranium weapons travel through air,
water, and food sources, the effects of U.S. deployment in Afghanistan
will be felt in Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan,
Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China and India. Countries
affected by the use of uranium weapons in Iraq include Saudi Arabia,
Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Turkey, and Iran.

Veterans
groups blame depleted uranium contamination as a factor in Gulf War
syndrome, the term for a host of ailments that afflicted thousands of
vets from that war.

"Anybody,
civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a permanent dose,
and it's not going to decrease very much over time," said Dietz, who
retired in 1983 after 33 years as nuclear physicist. "In the long run
... veterans exposed to ceramic uranium oxide have a major problem."

The
use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States, defying all
international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on earth
including the human species, and yet this country continues to do so
with full knowledge of its destructive potential.

At
least 300 million grams of depleted uranium were deposited on central
and southern Iraq during the Gulf War and subsequent bombings, over 100
million times the 0.023 gram maximum exposure dose permitted for
workers in nuclear industry. Depleted uranium, because of its unique
ratio of U-235 to U-238, can be readily identified and has been found
in the urine of exposed individuals as long as 10 years after exposure.

During
the brief Gulf War, thousands of tons of bombs were dropped on Iraq,
more than were used throughout World War II. By systematic intent, all
electric power generating facilities, water treatment and pumping
plants, sewage treatment facilities, and communication centers were
bombed.

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